et have strengthened week by week. The
blockade of Germany is far more effective than it was three months ago;
the evidence of its growing stringency accumulates steadily, and at the
same time the British Foreign Office has been anxiously trying, and
evidently with much success, to minimise for neutrals its inevitable
difficulties and inconveniences. Meanwhile, as Mr. Asquith will explain
next Tuesday, the expenditure on the war, not only on our own needs but on
those of our Allies is colossal--terrifying. The most astonishing Budget
of English History, demanding a fourth of his income from every well-to-do
citizen, has been brought in since I began to write these letters, and
quietly accepted. Five hundred millions sterling ($2,500,000,000) have
been already lent to our Allies. We are spending at the yearly rate of
600,000,000 sterling ($3,000,000,000) on the Army; 200,000,000 on the Navy
as compared with 40,000,000 in 1913; while the Munitions Department is
costing about two-thirds as much (400,000,000 sterling) as the rest of the
Army, and is employing close upon 2,000,000 workers, one-tenth of them
women. The export trade of the country, in spite of submarines and lack of
tonnage, is at the moment greater than it was in the corresponding months
of 1913.

As to what we have got for our money, Parliament has authorised an Army
of 4,000,000 men, and it is on the question of the last half million that
England's Effort now turns. Mr. Asquith will explain everything that has
been done, and everything that still remains to do, _in camera_ to
Parliament next Tuesday. But do not, my dear friend, make any mistake
_England will get the men she wants_; and Labour will be in the end just
as determined to get them as any other section of the Community.
Meanwhile, abroad, while we seem, for the moment, in France to be
inactive, we are in reality giving the French at Verdun just that support
which they and General Joffre desire, and--it can scarcely be
doubted--preparing great things on our own account. In spite of our
failure in Gallipoli, and the anxious position of General Townshend's
force, Egypt is no longer in danger of attack, if it ever has been; our
sea-power has brought a Russian force safely to Marseilles; and the
possibilities of British and Russian Collaboration in the East are
rapidly opening out. As to the great and complex war-machine we have been
steadily building up on French soil, as I tried to show in my fourth